310 WOODY PLANTS OF MASSACHUSETTS. 



rapidly, dividing into three branches, which formed a small, 

 round, rather dense top, fifty or sixty feet high. It was covered 

 with a very rough, brownish gray bark, and had, altogether, 

 so much the aspect of an elm, that it was, almost universally, 

 taken for one. I was informed that a still larger tree of the 

 same kind had formerly grown near it. Within two years, this 

 noble tree has fallen, like its brother, before the axe of improve- 

 ment. The leaf-bearing branchlets are very slender, slightly 

 downy, and covered with a reddish brown bark. The buds 

 are small, compressed, and rather pointed. The leaves are 

 four or five inches long and less than two wide, borne on a 

 small, round, short, somewhat hairy stalk. They are unequal- 

 sided, the side next the branch being much broader than the 

 other and strongly half-heart-shaped ; the other side being some- 

 times, but not always, half-hearted ; they are oblong, tapering 

 very slowly, ending in a long acumination, and sharply serrate 

 almost to the very point ; rough on both surfaces, bright green 

 above, pale beneath. They are less thick than the leaves of the 

 nettle tree ; although, in other respects, they correspond suffi- 

 ciently well with the description and figure of Michaux.* To 

 him and to other writers, I am indebted for the remainder of 

 this description ; for I have not seen the flowers, fruit or wood. 

 The trunk is commonly straight and without branches to a 

 great height. The bark is grayish and broken, thickly and 

 irregularly set with hard, blackish, permanent, corky asperities. 

 The branches are nearly horizontal and slender. The branch- 

 lets inclined or pendent, small, close-set, brown, scattered with 

 small, whitish warts; the young ones green, more or less downy. 

 The leaves on the vigorous shoots are from four to seven inches 

 long, and often of equal breadth, deeply toothed and rough, 

 sometimes almost equal-sided, sometimes exactly heart-shaped, 

 sometimes half-heart-shaped, or ovate-lanceolate. The stipules 

 are linear-lanceolate and pointed. Flowers of the size of those 

 of the nettle tree, with the segments of the perianth oblong, 

 obtuse, fringed at tip, ciliate on the border. Ovary conical, sur- 



* Spach, who is familiar with the tree as cultivated in France, finds fault with 

 this figure, because the fruits are incorrectly represented as black, and as growing 

 upon a stout and vigorous shoot with large and thick leaves. 



